International Journal of Organizational Leadership

Abstract

Workplace deviance is one of the undesirable behaviors which is responded by employees due to abusive supervision in the workplace. Abusive supervision is one of the crucial topics in the knowledge of the body of management literature. The employees display aggression and retaliation behavior against supervisor interpersonal mistreatment, and ultimately employees engage with deviant behavior. Psychological capital reduces the effect of workplace deviance in the presence of abusive supervision. This study presents a motivational model of how to decrease the effect of workplace deviance in the presence of abusive supervision. The total sample size was 300 pharmaceutical representatives, and simple random sampling technique was used. The structural equation modelling (SEM) technique was used, and the study found that psychological capital moderates the relationship between abusive supervision and employee workplace deviance. Practical implications give few reasons for abusive supervision and guidelines on how to reduce the influence of deviant behaviors and offer new directions for future research and report unexplored theoretical predictions.